Power: The Next Frontier

In the past decades the world of computers has witnessed phenomenal
advances. Computers have exhibited ever-increasing performance and
decreasing costs, making them more affordable, and in turn, accelerating
additional software and hardware development that fueled this trend
even more. While the pace of this progress has been quite impressive
over the last two decades, it is becoming harder and harder to maintain
it. Microarchitecture is now exposed to a new set of challenges
and has to consider and explicitly manage the limits of semiconductor
technology - such as power dissipation, wire delays, and soft errors.
This talk addresses the power challenge. The talk starts at looking
at the historical power trends and explaining why continuing "business
as usual" will bring the power consumption and the power density
to unmanageable levels. The talk later explains how microarchitecture
affects power and energy and will demonstrate recent strategies
and tactics to achieve more power-efficient microprocessors.

Ronny Ronen is the manager of the Microarchitecture
Research Lab of MRL in the Intel Israel Design Center. The research
group focuses on promoting microarchitecture innovations to improve
performance and reduce power of future Intel IA32 generations. Past
research in the group focused on microarchitecture innovations for
high performance and included topics like ILP improvements, enhanced
instruction caching structures, and more.
Prior to his microarchitecture activities, Ronny led the PentiumŪ
Processor compiler and performance simulation activities in the Intel
Israel Software department (in Haifa). Before that he was involved
in various software projects, most notably the development of software
development tools for the 8051 microcontroller, leading the hosting
of Intel tools on the VAX/VMS environment, leading the iRMX-286 R2.0
OS development, and leading the development of i860 software development
tools.
Ronny received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from
the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1978 and 1979 respectively.
Ronny holds five patents and has published five papers. Ronny is an
Intel Principal Engineer and a senior member of the IEEE.